The heads of several public sector organisations, but none from central government, have signed a promise to protect personal information.
Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, launched the 10 point Personal Information Promise on 28 January 2009. Those signing have pledged to "go further than just the letter of the law …

BT - Phorm

oh they jest - they are already trampling over data protection laws, nice of them to promise but what if they break the promise? They should already be dealing with people not only in just a disciplinary hearing but in criminal prosecutions if they misuse or have unauthorised access to data when the data belongs to someone else.

Most computer misuse is not done by outside crackers, it is done by people in the organisation who have been given access by misconfiguration or sheer incompetence, that is where all the button kiddies are, they are the receptionists, sys admins, project managers, tea boys of the world.

Gas anyone lifted the curtain ?........

No teeth: a promise worse than useless

What surprises me (not much, just a little) is that these men are so out of touch that they think a 1950-ish action "signing a promise" means anything to anyone anymore.

It certainly doesn't mean a thing to them in the absence of enforceable personal penalties. Don't they realize no one pays the slightest attention to grade school tactics like this? If you are a manager, public or private, it is presumed you will lie about anything and are indeed lying your head off at this very moment about something.

It's not a contract and it's not binding in any way.

What, pray tell, _is_ the point?

I believe the right wing (i.e. the American GOP and the UK NuLab parties) call this "self-regulation." What a bunch of bullshit.